The Demand for Businessperson Politicians: How Do Businesspeople Win Electoral Nominations and Votes?

Businesspeople are a highly represented occupational group in the governments of many countries. What electoral strategies do these businessperson politicians employ that afford them high electoral success? In a context where non-programmatic electoral strategies are common and when faced with strong constraints on the utilization of personal, party, and public resources for distributive purposes, I argue that businessperson candidates' access to private sector resources provides them with an alternative set of distributive resources that can be used to pursue political support, thereby granting businessperson candidates with an electoral advantage over other occupational groups.

Businessperson candidates are able to distribute private sector jobs to build an army of political workers who can provide political services. To test my arguments, I conducted list experiments with 986 employees in firms of businessperson candidates in Thailand. I find that employees in firms of businessperson candidates provide political services such as voting for the businessperson candidate, attending rallies, persuading acquaintances to support the businessperson candidate, and distributing goods and services produced by the firm to voters. Businessperson candidates, however, face a risk of shirking by patronage employees once hired. To overcome the commitment problem, I find that businessperson candidates rely on monitoring and negative inducements, in the form of employment termination threats, to mobilize these patronage employees to provide political services.